Pop Review | Elton John

Precious Solitude With 160 to Help

By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: July 15, 2004

Aharpist plays an arpeggio. An additional 98 orchestra members sit in the bleachers above the stage, waiting their turn. A 62-member choir bides its time. A rock band is set up below them. And there sits a man at a piano, singing, "I need you to turn to when I lose control/You're my guardian angel who keeps out the cold."

Who but Elton John could get away with this nonsense?

At Radio City Music Hall on Tuesday night Sir Elton gave the first of the five concerts he is to play there, with his band engorged by musicians from the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Juilliard School, along with singers from the expanded Brooklyn Youth Chorus. (The concert raised money for scholarships at the two schools.) This was not a night devoted to musical understatement: as Sir Elton barreled through his catalog, he was shameless and bombastic and - for the most part - irresistible.

Sir Elton turns his piano ballads into athletic displays, pounding the keys and bellowing the lyrics. (In "Have Mercy on the Criminal," his delivery of the word "mother" evoked the song of the same name by the punk-rock crooner Danzig.) After many of the songs he gave himself a standing ovation, pacing the stage triumphantly. In his own weird way Sir Elton is one of our most macho pop stars.

Many songs benefited from the orchestral treatment, or at any rate didn't suffer too much from it. There was a surprisingly light, mandolin-driven "Holiday Inn."

He played a subdued version of his recent hit "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore," a clever song built around a self-referential confession: "All the things I've said in songs/All the purple prose you bought from me/Reality's just black and white/The sentimental things I'd write/Never meant that much to me." This mopey repudiation of sentimentality is also, of course, an example of it; as usual, Sir Elton's brilliant lyricist, Bernie Taupin, wants to have it both ways.

The hall seemed to be full of casual fans, and Sir Elton played enough of his big hits to keep them happy, although he skipped "Bennie and the Jets." (Too bad: imagine the 62 singers lifting their voices as one and crying out, "Bennie! Bennie! Bennie! And the Jets!") He also played a new song, "Freaks in Love," from an album he said was due out in November. "We're on the outside looking in, a couple of freaks in love," he crooned, over a leisurely 6/8 beat.

Some of the slower songs were loud and tiresome: there were a few moments when one longed to toss a hair dryer into the bathos and end it all. But by the time he returned for an encore, singing a furious, choir-enhanced version of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," there was nothing to be done but sit there and admire the spectacle. The finale was "Your Song," an ear-busting duet with Renée Fleming. "I know it's not much, but it's the best I can do," she sang to him, and who could root against a couple this ridiculous?